I’m usually very sceptical of me-too Game of Thrones knock-offs, but the new Britannia series (starting tomorrow night) intrigues. Sky Atlantic’s new series is about the Roman conquest of Britain. It’s from a very good writer and team, which is encouraging, but sadly the rival BBC’s Radio Times reports today that…

“there’s a decidedly contemporary feel to the drama”

Oh well. I guess the actors weren’t up to quite that much period acting, consistently and across the entire cast. That’s an understandable approach in terms of cohering a sprawling historical epic, I suppose.

The costumes and make-up and props do look fabulous. Lots of mud n’ blood, apparently, of course. No fantasy dragons, but fantastical special effects are said to come from the psychedelic mushroom-chomping of the two local tribes. It’ll be interesting to see how deeply the series explores and visualises the animistic and land-magic angles.

Sadly the quotas and subsidies mean that its nine parts (some sources say ten) had to be filmed in the Czech Republic, with only small bits filmed in Wales. But hopefully it’ll stimulate more public awareness of the Iron Age in the British Isles. The tribes in the first series are the Cantii (Kent) and the Regni (roughly Sussex and Surrey). So they’re actually fairly civilised continental tribes of the Gaulish type (from where modern Belgium is, roughly), who had crossed over and occupied that part of our south coast about 170 years before the Romans arrived, and who had thus displaced the native British (the latest genetic testing suggests, up toward what is now London and over toward Devon/Cornwall).

So the Romans in the series are first encountering Gaulish Belgic recent-incomer tribes, relatively civilised tribes of the sort they’ve already become very familiar with on the continent. As Julius Caesar had noted of the tribes some ten years earlier, from his first-hand experience…

“those that inhabit the lands of the Cantii [Kent] are the most civilized and it is a wholly maritime region. These Cantii differ but little from the [continental] Gauls in habits of life. But [by contrast,] many of the inland Britons do not grow corn. They live on milk and flesh and are clothed in skins. All the Britons stain their persons with a dye that produces a blue colour. This gives them a more terrible aspect in battle.”

So how historically correct Britannia will be remains to be seen. Will the wild indigenous Britons be lurking mysteriously in the background, or will the “most civilized” Gaulish Cantii and the Regni be given wilder British aspects for dramatic purposes?